For early modern Christian theologians, the nature of god was more or less a settled question. There were, it is true, disputes along the margins. The synod of dort, convened in 1618 and 1619 to resolve debates between Calvinists and the arminian remonstrants, crystallized ongoing skirmishes over the proper understanding of divine foreknowledge and will. decades later, arminianism was just one of John Milton’s unorthodoxies, and one of his less eccentric ones; more unusual was his rejection, in his mature theology, of the doctrine of the Trinity. still, even at his most heretical, Milton could agree with nearly all reformed thinkers when it came to god’s essential attributes—immensity, infinity, eternality, immutability, omnipresence, omnipotence, omniscience, oneness—and his departures from orthodoxy generally begin from this common ground. 2 but if the question “What is god? ” had a sufficient answer in theory, thinking about god in more practical terms (How does he do things? ) proved less satisfying. Perhaps it still does. Take immutability: what can it mean in practice to be unchanging?

Time, he claims, is in fact a form of accommodation “which ariseth from our owne weak capacities and apprehensions, and not from the things of god them-selves,” and to assume that god is in any way limited by it is “satanicall pride. ”5 Fletcher’s resistance to giving god any sort of temporal punctuality explains why he wrote a theological poem without god in it—why, when it features a deliberation in heaven over man’s redemption, the scene takes the form of an allegorical debate between Justice and Mercy in which god himself barely appears. uch reluctance to represent god was typical of early modern narrative poems, and particularly of those written under the wide and deep influence of Protestant theology. 6 indeed, it must be said that Fletcher was stating, if in rather abrasive terms, the standard view. The Calvinist systematic theologian William ames puts it rather simply, arguing that our understanding of divine action is a convenient illusion: “no composition or change of power and act can have a place in the very simple and immutable nature of god. but it adds to god a certain relation of a real effect. 7 immutability, in this formulation, is fundamentally incompatible with action, for acting can happen only in time. Can there be any intelligible sense, the question is, in which our timeless god acts? The answer, for ames and Fletcher, seems to be no. but Milton, in his essay into systematic theology, de doctrina Christiana, is at least tempted to say yes. The treatise’s notorious antiTrinitarianism rests largely on an argument that makes very different assumptions about divine action: 34 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost ndisputably the Father can never have begotten a being who was begotten from eternity. What was made from eternity, was never in the process of being made. any being whom the Father begot from eternity, he must still be begetting, for an action which has no beginning can have no end. (d, 6:261–62) in other words, because the son’s begetting has been completed, it must have begun at a particular moment. and this means it occurred within a linear sequence. god’s creation of the son was in fact the creation of time, for this initial act formed a boundary separating a current state of affairs from an earlier one—even if that earlier period had been somehow timeless. 9 The aristotelian idea behind this, that time is a function of motion or change, finds expression in Paradise Lost: “For time, though in eternity, applied / To motion, measures all things durable / by present, past, and future. 10 but if Milton is unwilling to exempt god from the laws of aristotelian time, he is hardly more eager to abandon augustine’s view that god is uniquely timeless; indeed, it is above all his eternality that distinguishes the Father from the son and the rest of creation. Milton thus backs himself into something of a corner, committing both to the view that god is timeless and to the apparently contradictory view that god acts in time. 11 The question can now be put more pointedly: how can god be a truly infinite, eternal, and immutable being, and also one who enters meaningfully into our finite, temporal world? nd behind this metaphysical question is an epistemological one: how can we conceive of him doing so? or should we follow Fletcher and refuse even to try? ****** Milton, in Paradise Lost, does attempt to answer these questions, and my aim in this essay is to explore how he does so. narrative, for Milton, offers itself as a uniquely powerful way to tackle some of the most difficult metaphysical challenges posed by god, as a viable and perhaps preferable alternative to the methodical systematic theology of de doctrina. 2 if systematic theology is a better way to deal with conceptual what questions, narrative seems to have struck him as a more effective way to address practical how questions. This essay thus insists that narrative in Paradise Lost is an intellectually generative form, informed by the doctrines that it inherits from more traditionally theological texts but willing to seriously interrogate them, and to propose its own answers to their thornier problems. Put to work thinking through problems that remain open and unresolved, narrative samuel Fallon 35 s in Paradise Lost a mode of theological and metaphysical hypothesis—embracing something close to what John rumrich has called a “poetics of becoming”—and one of its central projects is to put forward a coherent theory of how an eternal, infinite god interacts with the limited world he created, or at least of how we can legitimately imagine him doing so. 13 i. narraTive disCoUrse in dE doCtriNa CHristiaNa despite a great deal of critical attention (or perhaps because of it), the relationship between de doctrina and Paradise Lost still resists easy definition.

The recent controversy over the treatise’s provenance has encouraged a debate over the extent to which its more heterodox ideas manifest themselves in the poem, and more broadly over whether or not the former can or should be read as a gloss on the latter. 14 The more promising recent treatments of the relationship have focused on the generic differences between the two texts, suggesting that the notion of Paradise Lost as a literary container for a predetermined theology should be replaced with a model in which treatise and poem approach similar problems in different ways. 5 one such difference—and the one on which i will focus—is that whereas Paradise Lost is, if nothing else, a story, de doctrina has a deeply ingrained aversion to narrative. This aversion is a function of the treatise’s form, which foregoes historical, diachronic inquiry in favor of an uncompromisingly synchronic approach to its subject. like Johannes Wolleb’s Compendium and ames’s Medulla, de doctrina follows the dialectical ethod developed by the French logician Petrus ramus, in which knowledge is organized by constant division and subdivision, with a broad concept steadily broken down by dichotomies until only the most basic constituent parts remain. 16 The framework of distribution that ramist method requires leaves little room for linear, progressive discourse, producing instead a dialectic that is primarily interested in the logic of classification and definition and that, for this reason, can be taken out of time. 17 but when the material under analysis is linear and temporal, this sort of topical, spatial approach to knowledge becomes problematic. o it is in de doctrina, which draws its evidence entirely from the bible—a collection of stories that is bound, at least in the eyes of believers, by an overarching, teleological narrative—and whose form thus seems to be inherently hostile to its own constitutive matter. 18 (several decades later, John locke would lament just this sort of scholarship, rebuking the practice of extracting biblical quotations by chapter and verse 36 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost without attention to a passage’s “continued coherent discourse” or the “Tenour of the Context. )19 The result, in practice, is that the treatise’s 9,346 biblical citations float randomly, in their assigned categories but shorn of context and sequence; on occasion, such an extraction severely distorts a quotation’s meaning. 20 but there are moments in de doctrina when Milton seems to sense the shortcomings of method and beckon towards narrative. The most intriguing of these moments is the puzzling discussion of accommodation, the hermeneutic principle that god adjusts his revealed persona to human intellects. ccommodation had proven a tricky concept for reformed theologians; its reliance on metaphor and allegory (in the claim that god is unlike representations of him) sits uneasily with an insistence on the literal truth of scripture, and while most theologians ultimately deemed the idea acceptable, Milton seems less sure. 21 god certainly does accommodate himself, Milton writes in a passage characterized by constant and increasingly pointed paradox, but we should force ourselves to forget it: “admittedly, god is always described or outlined not as he really is but in such a way as will make him conceivable to us. evertheless, we ought to form just such a mental image of him as he, in bringing himself within the limits of our understanding, wishes us to form” (d, 6:133). a warning a few lines later not to think of god in “anthropopathetic terms” (d, 6:134) is immediately undercut by an injunction to accept the literal truth of passages in which god appears or acts like a human being. 22 at this point Milton enters a scriptural thicket: if Jehovah repented that he had created man, gen. vi. 6, and repented because of their groanings, Judges ii. 18, let us believe that he did repent. ut let us not imagine that god’s repentance arises from lack of foresight, as man’s does, for he has warned us not to think about him in this way: num. xxiii. 19: God is not a man that he should lie, nor the son of man that he should repent. (d, 6:134–35) if we have followed Milton this far, we are now tasked with resolving a pair of contraries, and it is immediately apparent that the ramist tactic of distributing and defining is of little help: an act that is both repentance and non-repentance seems not to fit into any class at all.

The treatise admits this failure with a series of tautologies: “[l]et us believe that it is not beneath god to feel what grief he does feel, to be refreshed by what refreshes him, and to fear what he does fear” (d, 6:135). The passage as good as abandons formal logic as a way of understanding god’s actions, forcing our attention away from the such samuel Fallon 37 an action’s definition to its occurrence: the most we can say about it is that it happens. The tautologies thus in one motion demonstrate the insufficiency of one approach to the problem and demand another. nd what they demand is narrative. 23 in fact, to look closely at Milton’s discussion of accommodation is to see traces of a narrative mode already at work. This section of the treatise is filled with subjunctive verbs, which are used in the service of arguments of probability that rest uncomfortably in a ramist text: We ought not to imagine that god would have said anything or caused anything to be written about himself unless he intended (noluisset) that it should be a part of our conception of him.

We may be certain that god’s majesty and glory were so dear to him, that he could never say (loqueretur) anything of himself which was lower or meaner than his real nature, nor would he ever ascribe (attribuat) to himself any property if he did not wish (nolit) us to ascribe it to him. (d, 6:134, 136)24 Milton is advancing here the argument that scriptural evidence must be literally true, or that at least god must want it to be accepted as literally true; otherwise he would not have given it to us. This sort of argument differs from most of the rest of de doctrina, as well as from other systematic theologies. nstead of proposing a definition and making arguments from certain premises, Milton is here reaching for a likely conclusion based on an intuition about the subjective nature of an actor. He is arguing, in other words, in tactical rather than absolute terms: given how god is likely to have arranged things, this is our best bet. in this respect, the section marks an important shift away from a consideration of god as a concept to be analyzed and towards one that focuses on how and why he does things. t begins to tell a story about god, subtly crafting a diachronic account of divine revelation. Milton’s framing of the problem thus suggests its solution (a more cynical reader might accuse it of circularity) for even as it exposes the limits of method it begins to engage theology in the terms of narrative. in Paradise Lost, Milton sets out to apply this alternative mode of theological analysis more broadly. There are a number of problems that lend themselves more to the considerations of chronology, of actor, of cause and effect, than to the classificatory distinctions of methodical logic.

The two Falls are good examples: it is difficult to explain in abstract terms how a good creature could fall without being pushed, how satan and adam could freely make the decisions for 38 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost which they are punished, and so Paradise Lost attempts to understand them by reconstructing particular situations in which they might have occurred. 25 There is reason to think that the question the rest of this essay will deal with—what does it mean for god to act? —is better dealt with in narrative as well. s leo damrosch puts it, “Whereas theology (including Milton’s in de doctrina) tends to seek abstraction and to stress the inscrutability of god, the imagination wants god to be a father whom it can love, which means that god must possess qualities that are recognizably human. ”26 in a period in which confessional allegiances hinged on conflicting ideas about god’s relationship with humanity, as reflected in disputes over election and the availability of grace, these are not minor concerns. but there is a further reason to think that this last problem in particular invites a narrative response.

This becomes clear when we restate the problem with which we began: how does a timeless, infinite god enter into the finite, temporal world in which we live? at its heart, narrative form—an account of discrete events occurring sequentially in time—is our mimetic accounting of precisely this world. Hence the metaphysical problem at issue (does god act in time? ) turns out to be contiguous with a decidedly poetic question: can we tell a story about him? This is why de doctrina is pushed to the edge of narrative at the very moment when it is forced to consider what it means for god to repent, or be refreshed, or be afraid. od is allergic to narrative because he is allergic to temporal, finite existence, which means that if the poetic problem can be solved, the metaphysical one can as well. To successfully write an eternal, infinite god into a story, in other words, is to demonstrate how exactly he can interact with this limited, time-bound world of ours. ii. god exPressed: FaTHer and son in ParadisE Lost if this is the task of Paradise Lost, though, it must be admitted that Milton’s own language often seems to undercut it. escriptions of god, like this one in the angelic hymn in book 3, typically frame themselves in decidedly negative terms: immutable, immortal, infinite, eternal king, thee author of all being, Fountain of light, thyself invisible amidst the glorious brightness where thou sitst Throned inaccessible (PL, 3. 373–77) samuel Fallon 39 such declarations of poetic impotence are typical of early modern religious narrative poems, which assiduously avoided directly representing god and described him (when they did so) in deliberately opaque language.

Joseph beaumont’s Psyche, a massive allegory of the soul’s journey to Christ, offers a comparable example: i see thou art immense and infinite; Therefore i see thee not; yet see thee more by this unable and denying sight, Than they whose saucy eyes dare by the poor Comparison of whatsoe’r it be expresse the Measure of the deitie. 27 The paradoxical conceit of Psyche’s sighted blindness satisfies, if it does, because it seems fittingly incomprehensible next to the divine mystery, a bit of nonsense commensurate to god’s incommensurability. uch poetic deference contrasts sharply with the ambitious, assuredly positive theological treatises offered during the same period by Wolleb and ames—and by Milton himself. These treatises aimed to provide a comprehensive definition of god by identifying and defining each of his essential attributes, and it is true that their technique of metaphysical anatomy achieves a certain completeness. but it also rules out other approaches to god, particularly imaginative ones: if, for example, god is infinite, we should refrain from giving him visible form. ordon Teskey’s discussion of “god’s two bodies” gets at this tension between imaginative and analytical thought: as a concept, god’s body is not a body at all but a substance that extends to infinity; infinite substance is something you can grasp with your mind, by logic, but it is not something you can see in your mind’s eye. as a metaphor, god’s body is an anthropomorphic image of a king on a throne, even if he is a king the angels themselves cannot see. . . . you can see god in your mind’s eye, but you know when you see him, as you know with all metaphors, that the luxury of seeing is paid at the expense of truth. 8 Poetic representation of god in this way constantly threatens to violate the metaphysical claims made about his nature. This is the point that Fletcher was attempting to make in the preface to his Historie: positive theology demands negative poetry. Changes in the early modern literary landscape further increased this pressure. 29 The medieval mystery plays, the primary sources for biblical narrative before the renaissance, had been less resistant than 40 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost

Milton’s contemporaries to depictions of god; most included god as a character, and some of them provided him with lines well beyond those in genesis. but the mimetic impulse in these plays was subordinated to a symbolic, allegorical level of meaning, which meant that the physical presence of the actor did not have to imply an anthropomorphic god, or indeed any actual entrance by god into the human world. 30 an early sixteenth-century play by John bale offers a useful example. 31 The play shows god (Pater Caelestis) making divine promises to a series of biblical figures: adam, noah, Moses, david, and John the baptist.

These appearances by god are justified at times by specific biblical sources, but also more broadly by the allegorical identification with the covenant, in its various forms, between god and humanity. by the end of the sixteenth century, however, the emergence of the heroic poem as the primary vehicle for religious narrative and the diminished interest (after Martin luther and John Calvin) in reading scripture allegorically had increased attention to the literal realism of the narratives, and had introduced a corresponding reluctance to represent god directly. 2 Milton’s own drafts for a tragedy on the subject of Paradise Lost have an allegorical bent, with figures such as Justice and Mercy standing in for god, and his exchange of tragedy for epic coincided with a shift from allegorical to literal representation of divinity. 33 While this shift did not lead Milton to avoid representing god, this was precisely its effect on his peers, who either refused to represent god at all or did so by explicitly marking such representations as metaphorical accommodations or as allegories, even in otherwise non-allegorical poems. 4 genesis posed its own special difficulties with its frequent accounts of god appearing and speaking directly to humans. Poets typically dealt with these troublesome moments by hewing closely to scripture, reporting the speeches found there but adding little, and the resulting figure of god was usually little more than a disembodied voice. Milton subtly suggests a more satisfying solution in book 10 of Paradise Lost, when the son descends to the garden to dispense punishments to the fallen adam and eve. n heaven, the poem always distinguishes the Father from the son by using their relational names, carefully reminding us that they are two different persons. on earth, however, the distinction dissolves, as Father and son are replaced by the more ambiguous and expansive God. When the son descends from heaven in book 10, the poem abruptly switches names, and when he speaks to adam and eve he is simply called “god. ”35 The revelation that this name can refer to the son subtly allows us to reread each interaction between god and man in Paradise Lost—and indeed in the bible— samuel Fallon 41 as an interaction with the son as mediator. 6 We no longer need to imagine that the Father appeared openly to adam; he can remain, in these cases at least, safely beyond this world. but if Milton here seems moved, like his peers, to write the Father out of his poem, the fact is that in other places he boldly writes him into it. indeed, in the various scenes in heaven that depict the Father (including a dialogue that directly precedes the son’s punishment of adam and eve in book 10) we find a much fuller representation of god than in any comparable poem from the period. The god whom we meet offers compelling testimony as to why so few of Milton’s peers mounted similar attempts.

The Father insistently resists expression, and often the poem acknowledges his ineffability by turning to the son as his image or sign: beyond compare the son of god was seen Most glorious, in him all his Father shone substantially expressed, and in his face divine compassion visibly appeared. (PL, 3. 138–41) The idea of the son as the word or expression of the Father is a constant refrain both in de doctrina and Paradise Lost, and its pervasiveness has led William shullenberger to suggest that the filial relationship is best understood by reference to structural linguistics. 37 such an explanation seems insufficient. n the poem, at least, the son’s role is more flexible than merely that of signifier, while the Father, for his part, eventually comes to stand and speak for himself, unmediated. We can see this most clearly in book 3’s dialogue in heaven, our first encounter with god as a character in the poem. Here, divine expression is a process—Kathleen swaim has perceptively described “the enactment of the process of accommodation in the dialogue”—with the son at first signifying or representing the Father directly and then, gradually, guiding him into a sometimes unsteady mode of self-expression. 8 The dialogue, which foretells the Fall and culminates in the son’s offer to save humanity, begins unpromisingly. The Father speaks first, and, for a discussion of such a deeply charged event, his tone is terrifyingly cold and legalistic. The speech’s syntax is willfully perverse, coiling back on itself and flitting from tense to tense for no apparent reason, betraying little interest in being understood: “if i foreknew, / Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault, / Which had no less proved certain unforeknown” (PL, 3. 117–19). arbara lewalski has argued that the speech is modeled on classical forensic rhetoric, and 42 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost it is true that it is intended to demonstrate satan’s and adam’s guilt. 39 but its logic is deeply compressed, admitting no emotion, no appeal to character, no rhetorical elaboration: The first sort by their own suggestion fell, self-tempted, self-depraved: man falls deceived by the other first: man therefore shall find grace, The other none (PL, 3. 129–32) There is hardly a wasted syllable here; each word serves the exposition of fact or the logical application of ethical principle.

The speech is, in stanley Fish’s formulation, “the union of method—the self-generating exposition of what is—and a philosophically accurate vocabulary, admitting neither ambiguity nor redundancy. ”40 self-generating is right; the speech seems unaware that it has listeners, and perhaps even that it has a speaker. The Father, as we meet him here, is present and yet utterly absent, and it is not surprising that, although the speech is thundered out to all of heaven, the attendant angels cannot quite keep up.

They sense that what god is saying is good, but this seems to be at most a vague intuition. Falling short of a concrete understanding of the argument, the angels gather instead an “ambrosial fragrance” and a “[s]ense of new joy ineffable diffused” (PL, 3. 135, 137). The poem, however, refuses to leave god to this inaccessible limbo. instead, it uses the son to engage the Father and, in the process of their dialogue, to draw him into the temporal, localized world of the angels—and into the temporal, localized structure of narrative.

The son begins by recapitulating the Father’s assessment of fallen humanity and his promise of redemption, but in doing so he replaces the Father’s dry logic with a story that centers on god, as the judge who levies punishment and the savior who promises mercy. in urging the Father not to damn humanity, the son also emphasizes the narrative context of this potentially decisive moment: that be from thee far, That far be from thee, Father, who art Judge of all things made, and judgest only right. (PL, 3. 153–55)

These are fascinating lines; the chiastic echo of the second clause suggests the difficulty (felt momentarily by the son but constantly by the poet) of trying to comprehend and express the relationship between the divine “thee” and “all things made. ” The pleading language is, samuel Fallon 43 of course, meant less to persuade—the speech, unfeeling as it was, did conclude by promising mercy—than to demand that the Father answer to a real interlocutor. it is meant to coax him into personality, into sociability, into narrative. and it works.

The Father’s response marks a new beginning with a suddenly more fluid language, and it discards the methodical exposition of the first speech in favor of a vital, prophetic story, in which the Father affirms his active role in assuring man’s ultimate salvation: once more will i renew His lapsed powers, though forfeit and enthralled by sin to foul exorbitant desires; Upheld by me, yet once more shall he stand on even ground against his mortal foe, by me upheld, that he may know how frail His fallen condition is, and to me owe all his deliverance, and to none but me. (PL, 3. 175–82) eginning with a firm promise of divine action and ending with the declaration that salvation depends on “none but me,” these lines are dominated by the first person. in the earlier speech, the first person appeared in order to distance itself from the action—“if i foreknew”— but now it moves to involve itself, to close down the distance it had opened up before: “once more will i renew. ” The inverted repetition “Upheld by me . . . by me upheld” further declares the Father’s new involvement, and it subtly picks up the son’s “That be from thee far” plea, acknowledging and answering the question posed by the earlier inversion. o distant when the scene began, the Father is now unmistakably responsive to his particular situation, to his interlocutor, and to his wider audience. The exchange of speeches has finally become a dialogue. iii. THe sTrange FaTHer The relationship between Father and son is thus more than one of mere instrumentality; at times, as we have seen, the son stands in for the Father directly, but here he engages him dialectically, forcing him to respond and in the process slowly leading him out of the remoteness of infinitude and eternality into local, temporal expression. The Father ends his second peech by speaking to the same angels whom a few moments ago he seemed to forget: 44 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost say heavenly powers, where shall we find such love, Which of ye will be mortal to redeem Man’s mortal crime, and just the unjust to save, dwells in all heaven charity so dear? (PL, 3. 213–16) The dialogue thus ends more comfortably than it began. The son volunteers to redeem man’s sins and the Father offers a triumphant prediction of his success before the scene ends with the angels singing, at the Father’s bidding, a hymn of joint praise. till, the Father’s adjustment is neither smooth nor complete; in important ways, he remains outside of the poem’s narrative, just as he remains outside of the temporal, finite world that it approximates. indeed, the question that the Father poses to his angelic audience— who will redeem man? —undermines his narrative viability even as it is established, exposing the limits on his ability to act. The fact is that an immutable god cannot become human or die; the Father is therefore pushed to the edge of impotence, unable to save man without abrogating his own law: “die he or Justice must” (PL, 3. 10). The Father’s appeal to the heavenly host thus threatens to greatly diminish his status. We might even sense that the dialogue itself encodes a kind of degradation: would god have entered the story in the first place if he did not need something from his creaturely underlings? 41 This moment of apparent vulnerability, moreover, is answered by a show of strength from the son, who resolves to do what his Father cannot—undergo death—so that neither man nor justice must.

The speech in which the son makes the offer places an unnerving emphasis on his own ascendant power: “i shall rise victorious, and subdue / My vanquisher, spoiled of his vaunted spoil” (PL, 3. 250–51) he declares and, a few lines later, “i through the ample air in triumph high / shall lead hell captive maugre hell” (PL, 3. 254–55). The fulsome praise with which the Father responds gives an implicit sanction to this boasting, but it nevertheless feels a bit indecorous, underscoring as it does the Father’s relative powerlessness.

This unwelcome, but perhaps unavoidable, tension points to a deeper structural problem: the limited sphere of action in which the Father can move. The more Milton shows god speaking and acting, the more apparent become the things he cannot do: he cannot die; he cannot suffer; ultimately, he cannot change. Whereas adam, eve, satan, and even the son are all capable of transformation—as demonstrated by the two Falls on the one hand and the son’s ascent “[b]y merit more than birthright” on the other—the Father is bound by his samuel Fallon 45 nature to always remain the same (PL, 3. 309). 2 in theological terms, immutability is an aspect of perfection, rendering god invulnerable to contingency. but for a poet writing god, it has the curious side effect of making him, in a fundamental sense, unequal to the demands of narrative. Unlike the other characters in Paradise Lost, he cannot match the story’s progression with any growth of his own. The son and satan, in particular, are characters generated by—and generative of— the poem’s narrative; the Father, on the other hand, is by his essence bound to certainty and sameness. This is one way in which, as blake had it, “Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and god. 43 The fetters seem to grow tighter the more closely we interrogate the poem’s plot. a number of readers have noticed that the dialogue in heaven in book 3 is modeled on the dialogue between Zeus and athena in book 1 of the odyssey, which begins with Zeus (like the Father in Paradise Lost) protesting the unfairness of humans blaming him for their misfortunes. 44 sarah van der laan summarizes the parallels: both these acts of self-theodicy reflect the same complaint: humans hold the divine responsible for the presence of evil in the cosmos, when the true responsibility for those evils lies with humankind itself. oth speeches are striking and provocative, and they draw swift and parallel responses. each father’s complaint elicits a counterargument from his favorite child: athene in the odyssey and the son in Paradise Lost speak up to put in a good word for a pet cause. 45 The allusion leads us to read the Father as we would Zeus, as a conflicted judge open to the persuasive intervention of a favored child. in this context, the son’s speech becomes a “counterargument” that persuades god to do the right thing, and van der laan reads the episode, quite reasonably, as “the son holding the Father to his own principles. saying even just this, however, forces us to confront the reality that god is nothing like Zeus, and that he never needs persuasion—nor can he even be open to it. as van der laan concedes (with some understatement), unlike Zeus, “Milton’s Father, with the benefits of omniscience and omnipotence, already possesses a welldeveloped plan. ”46 The point is not that Milton’s dialogue in heaven is not a reworking of Homer’s—surely it is—but rather that one of the effects of this sort of allusion is to highlight its unsuitability for god, or god’s unsuitability for it. nd the more the identification is pressed, the less sufficient it seems. We may thus be led to qualify lewalski’s by-now classic claim that “Milton imagines and presents the dialogue in Heaven through many generic frames and with reference to several 46 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost specific models, developing true and transcendent norms to supplant satan’s debased or perverted ones. ”47 even if satan’s version of epic is debased parody, he nevertheless can inhabit his role in a way that the Father cannot.

The fact that satan and the son are fully equipped for life in narrative while the Father is armored against it may explain why the former have proven so attractive to readers, and why the Father has not. “behind the attractiveness of Milton’s satan,” writes neil Forsyth, “as most unprejudiced readers usually soon notice, is the problem of god. ”48 The most emphatic statement of “the problem of god” is, of course, William empson’s indictment of the tyrannical Father in a book, Milton’s God, that in recent years has entered a new vogue. 9 empson’s spirit can be found animating Michael bryson’s assertion that “Milton constructs a god who is nearly indistinguishable from satan,” or behind Peter C. Herman’s less hyperbolic observation that “[e]xpecting to find a just, merciful god, many readers find themselves confronting a god who is querulous at best, tyrannical at worst. ”50 These claims, though bold, are carefully qualified. For bryson, Milton’s Father is not the Christian god, but rather a disagreeably monarchical representation of him, offered so that it can be rejected and replaced with a better one.

Herman, meanwhile, is tellingly delicate, passing off to a band of unsuspecting “readers” the inflammatory reading that he may not wish to fully commit to himself. Perhaps this delicacy is unnecessary. Milton’s god is frustrating; he does sometimes seem querulous, even tyrannical. but i am skeptical of the notion that these frustrations are the residue of a latent ethical critique of the Father. My suggestion is that they are instead the secondary (and very likely unintended) consequences of the poem’s attempt to solve the metaphysical and epistemological problems of god’s interactions with his created world. od is simply different. He resists narrative expression, and even when the son gradually leads him into it, his entrance remains in many ways hollow. He never quite belongs, and he is never completely understood either by his angelic audiences within the poem or by his readers outside of it. Ultimately, it is not hard to see how this metaphysical remoteness could be translated into ethical estrangement, into personal coldness and indifference. We can see just this sort of translation—perhaps we should call it misinterpretation—in the scene of the son’s exaltation in book 5.

The poem introduces the speech by invoking the characteristic language of negative theology, describing god as “a flaming Mount, whose top / brightness had made invisible” (PL, 5. 598–99). on its face, the speech samuel Fallon 47 is straightforward, but as we read it we realize that its meaning is as elusive as its speaker is invisible: Hear all ye angels, progeny of light, Thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers, Hear my decree, which unrevoked shall stand.

This day i have begot whom i declare My only son, and on this holy hill Him have anointed, whom ye now behold at my right hand; your head i him appoint; and by myself have sworn to him shall bow all knees in heaven, and shall confess him lord: Under his great vicegerent reign abide United as one individual soul Forever happy: him who disobeys Mee disobeys, breaks union, and that day Cast out from god and blessed vision, falls into utter darkness, deep engulfed, his place ordained without redemption, without end. (PL, 5. 600–15)

The first apparent problem is one of chronology: the begetting of the son, Milton tells us in de doctrina, preceded the creation of heaven and earth, so the son cannot have been begotten on “this day. ”51 We can solve this problem easily enough: de doctrina also clarifies that the son’s begetting can refer metaphorically to his exaltation in heaven as well as literally to his creation. 52 but having set aside this initial difficulty, we are then left with a second, more obstinate one: why does the Father announce it now? t is this unprompted announcement that spurs the rebellion in heaven, and readers have long thought that here, at least, satan just might have a point. The Father’s decree seems to be provocatively arbitrary, offered with no justification but nevertheless demanding absolute obedience. as empson complained, “[T]o give no reason at all for the exaltation makes it appear a challenge. ”53 The Father’s aloofness in this scene—his evident detachment from his angelic audience—certainly tempts an ethically critical reading. ut i maintain that the scene is more credibly read as a mimesis of the epistemological dissonance of timelessness and temporality than as an example of petulant or tyrannical governance. What if the confusion— the bizarre timing, the apparent arbitrariness—is simply the result of a decree uttered in eternity being misunderstood in a temporal world? What if this is an instance of god being lost in translation? of him being heard, in a very literal sense, at the wrong time? The speech, 48 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost t is important to note, is not reported directly but mediated by raphael—one of the angels, presumably, who fails to hear the Father’s speech in book 3. Then there is the scrambling of narrative time: the speech is chronologically the first moment recorded in the poem, but it does not appear until halfway through, a bit of confusion that furthers a sense of the temporal world being momentarily overwhelmed by god’s presence. The crucial piece of evidence, though, is that the Father is speaking here without the mediating assistance of the son, who sits beatifically but idly by.

Without the son to guide him into the narrative moment, to help him find expression, the Father remains incomprehensible, resisting and disrupting narrative in the most basic of ways. and it is not surprising that this particularly ambitious attempt to enter the narrative—it is unmistakably a speech act, with the Father elevating the son by declaring, “your head i him appoint”—fails more dramatically than any other. The problems begin immediately: “all seemed well pleased, all seemed, but were not all” (PL, 5. 617). iv. reading god: THe exaMPle oF THe angels ven angels, it seems, are at risk of misunderstanding god. satan’s rebellion, our account suggests, was the product of a fateful misreading, the result of a breakdown of perception and interpretation. This should be in the back of our minds when we read the angelic hymn in book 3, a hymn that responds both to its immediate narrative context, the dialogue in heaven between the Father and the son, and to the whole scope of history, past and future, related in Paradise Lost: the account the angels offer may be deeply, and dangerously, wrong.

Precisely because they are not reliable commentators, however, the angels usefully stand in for the poem’s human readers. like us, they are locked in time and place; like us, they are attempting to understand the events they have just witnessed, to make sense of this god and his son. and because they are liable to misread god in the same ways that we are, the uncertainties and tensions turned up in the hymn closely mirror those mined by Milton’s human readers. n its structure the hymn carefully echoes the dialogue that precedes it, a bit of evidence that encourages us to see the hymn as a response to, or a reading of, the dialogue. it begins by praising the Father in conventionally negative language, calling him “invisible” and “inaccessible” (PL, 3. 375, 377). The angels then turn to the son, noting his role as the vehicle of divine expression, “in whose conspicuous countenance, without cloud / Made visible, the almighty Father samuel Fallon 49 shines” (PL, 3. 385–86). nce the relationship between the two has been explained, and the transition from the one to the other justified, the hymn shifts from description to story: He heaven of heavens and all the powers therein by thee created, and by thee threw down The aspiring dominations: thou that day Thy Father’s dreadful thunder didst not spare, nor stop thy flaming chariot wheels, that shook Heaven’s everlasting Frame, while o’er the necks Thou drov’st of warring angels disarrayed. (PL, 3. 390–96) With the shift from identification to narrative complete, the angels return to the Father. few lines ago he was altogether inexpressible, but now he supports a story of his own: Father of mercy and grace, thou didst not doom so strictly, but much more to pity incline: no sooner did thy dear and only son Perceive thee purposed not to doom frail man so strictly, but much more to pity inclined, He to appease thy wrath, and end the strife of mercy and justice in thy face discerned, regardless of the bliss wherein he sat second to thee, offered himself to die For man’s offence. PL, 3. 401–410) The mediation between infinite and finite that the son executes in the dialogue is reenacted here. in the dialogue, the son carefully led the Father into temporal, narrative expression and out of the abstract isolation of his first speech. in the hymn, it is by telling the story of the son that the angels discover a way to imagine god. indeed, the structure of this paternal relationship becomes something of a fixation. “He . . .

By thee created, and by thee threw down,” we read, the prepositions meticulously arranging the hierarchy; meanwhile, the thunderbolts that the son hurls at the rebel angels are only in the hymn identified as the Father’s, and as they praise the son’s offer to die for man, the angels prudently remember to note that he remains “[s]econd to thee. ”54 The reason for these constant reminders of the divine hierarchy, which eventually begin to seem tendentious, is an undercurrent pulling insistently in the other direction. at the end of the hymn, the angels turn back to the son: 50 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost

Hail, son of god, saviour of men, thy name shall be the copious matter of my song Henceforth, and never shall my harp thy praise Forget, nor from thy Father’s praise disjoin. (PL, 3. 412–15) The promise to remember the son again in a later song is a classical trope, a part of the greco-roman hymnic tradition that stretches back through Callimachus to the ancient songs once attributed to Homer, and in its early instances the trope recorded the tensions and rivalries implicit in the genre: to praise one olympian god was, inevitably, not to praise many others.

The Christian pantheon is smaller—the focus on Father and son actually marks a widening of the hymn’s other source, the monotheistic hymns in Psalms—but the angels’ hymn seems to record a similar anxiety when it tacks on the final clause, “nor from thy Father’s praise disjoin. ” For this is precisely the danger: that the son’s praise will disjoin from the Father’s. indeed, the stories that the angels sing always lead back to the son; he routs satan and he will undergo incarnation and death. ll the syntactic care the angels can muster cannot hide the son’s activity or the Father’s eternal stasis. at times, the hymn seems ready to abandon the Father entirely, only to pull back at the last second. When the angels sing to the son, “thy Powers with loud acclaim / Thee only extolled,” only hangs as a sort of challenge: why are they not extolling his Father as well (PL, 3. 397–98)? We can feel the momentum of narrative, pulling the hymn into the story of the son and away from the strange, remote presence of the Father. ut the temptation provokes a hasty rebuke, with the next phrase clarifying exactly who is being praised: “son,” it says, “of thy Father’s might” (PL, 3. 398). Ultimately, these prepositional gymnastics—He by thee, son of thy Father—are the only way to keep the Father in the story. The action belongs to the son. ****** This tendency of narrative to pull us away from the Father is a prime example of what Fish sternly calls the “temptation of plot. 55 For Fish’s Milton, the problem is not that god is outside of time, but that we are too much in it: narrative and plot are vehicles of idolatry because they locate significance in some insight to be generated by time, rather than in the timeless, always present obligation to be aligned with the will of deity; plot and narrative tell us where to go, whereas the true question . . . is: what shall one be? 56 samuel Fallon 51 The implication is that the angels should stop trying to interpret the divine history in which they are caught up—and so should we. Fish also alerts us to the temptations of intelligibility and understanding. ) Metaphysical questions about god do little more than distract us from the only thing that matters: the internal, private obligation to faith. and indeed, there is a sense in which the angels misread the Father because they insist on applying the terms of narrative—the terms of localized existence, of action in time—when they should know to let them go. narrative is the language of created beings, and Paradise Lost seems to suggest that satan and his followers fell because they refused to acknowledge any other. f so, the poem largely comes to affirm the negative theology that it attempted to escape, finally leading us to the conclusion that god is, if not inexpressible, better left unexpressed. My own view is that Milton has more sympathy for god’s inadequate readers than this account implies. The epistemological tragedy at the heart of Paradise Lost is that narrative thinking cannot be transcended, and it cannot reach god. but that does not stop Milton from trying to push it there, and to the extent that he fails, god, in his irreducible strangeness, seems to share the blame. f the poem finally upholds a negative theology, in other words, it does so only after submitting that theology to scrutiny far more searching than any offered by his fellow theological poets. What results is a uniquely nuanced and, indeed, audacious approach to the problem of imagining god. it is a mark of this audacity that the insurmountable gap between god and us is represented as his weakness as well as ours; in Paradise Lost, god fails narrative as much as narrative fails god. nd if Milton thus gives in to the “temptation of plot,” it is hard not to think that the deep seriousness of his poem has earned him at least that liberty. Yale University noTes This essay has benefited from the generosity of many friends and colleagues, and i am deeply grateful to all of them. My chief debts are to William Poole, whose advice helped the project take shape, and to david Quint and david scott Kastan, whose thoughtful readings improved the final draft. i also wish to thank the U. s. -U. K.

Fulbright Commission, whose financial and institutional support allowed the essay to be written. 1 For a thorough documentation of the synod, see anthony Milton, ed. , the British delegation and the synod of dort, (Woodbridge: boydell Press, 2005). on John Milton’s arminian insistence that the free human will plays a decisive role in obtaining salvation–against the Calvinist tenets of irresistible grace and limited atonement–see dennis danielson, Milton’s Good God: a study in Literary theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982). 2 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost 2 Milton describes these attributes in his treatise in systematic theology, de doctrina Christiana. see the Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. don Wolfe, 8 vol. (new Haven: yale Univ. Press, 1953-1982), 6:139-49. Hereafter abbreviated d and cited parenthetically by volume and page number). For similar examples from earlier systematic theologians, see William ames, Medulla theologica (amsterdam, 1628), 1215, and Johannes Wolleb, Christianae theologiae Compendium (basel, 1633), 15-19. Joseph Fletcher, the Historie of the Perfect-Cursed-Blessed Man (london, 1628), sigs. C1r-C1v. 4 see augustine’s discussion in book 11 of the Confessions of time and divine eternality. augustine’s view, given important support by boethius, remained influential into the renaissance. 5 Fletcher, sig. C2r. 6 it is probably no coincidence that the two renaissance epics before Milton to overcome this aversion, Marco girolamo vida’s Christiad and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, were written in sixteenth-century italy. ames, 22. The original latin reads: “nulla enim compositio, aut mutatio potentiae, & actus, locu[m] potest habere in simplicissima & immutabili dei natura. addit tamen relationem quondam dei ad effectum reale. ” see also amandus Polanus, syntagma theologiae Christianae (Hanover, 1609), 1516: “deus no[n] esset immutabilis. nam quod movetur, non est immutabile [The operation of god is not a motion, because if it were, god would not be immutable. For what is moved is not immutable]. ” both translations are mine. de doctrina calls the begetting of the son “god’s first and most excellent sPeCial deCree” and confirms that he is the first manifestation of god’s external efficiency (d 6:166; see also 6:205). 9 Milton shared the view that god exists in time with the socinians, who were similarly interested in applying rigorous logic to theological mysteries; he did not share the conclusion to which this premise led them, that god has no certain knowledge of future contingencies. see H. John Mclachlan, socinianism in seventeenth-Century England (oxford: oxford Univ. Press, 1951), 186. 10 Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. lastair Fowler, 2nd ed. (Harlow: longman, 1998), 5. 580-82. Hereafter abbreviated PL and cited parenthetically by book and line number. For aristotle’s views on time and motion, see Physics 4, 217b-223. 11 Philosophers of religion continue to debate the problem of god’s apparent timelessness and his involvement in our temporal world. approaching Milton’s position is alan g. Padgett, in gregory e. ganssle, ed. , God and time: Four Views (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 2001): “god is the metaphysical precondition for the existence of eternity (understood here as a pure duration that is relatively timeless). ur time, created time, exists within the pure duration of god’s time, which is relatively timeless” (106). in this view, there was durational time before god created anything, but this time is essentially different from time in and after creation. 12 The stakes of writing the Christian god into a poetic narrative have recently been the subject of studies by Tobias gregory and abraham stoll, both of whom root their studies in the “Mosaic distinction” between polytheistic and monotheistic divinity. in From Many Gods to one: divine action in renaissance Epic (Chicago: Univ. f Chicago Press, 2006), gregory traces the representation of deity across the history of epic, locating in the shift from a polytheistic classical olympus to a monotheistic, omnipotent Christian god the emergence of new theological challenges for epic narrative, particularly the question of free will and the problem of evil. stoll’s Milton and samuel Fallon 53 Monotheism (Pittsburgh: duquesne Univ. Press, 2009) examines Milton in the context of seventeenth-century discourses on the Mosaic distinction.

His book, which came to my attention too late to be fully addressed in this essay, also explores the difficulties posed for narrative by god’s ineffability and immutability. but whereas stoll argues that Milton finds a solution to these difficulties in the concept of god’s “flickering subjectivity” (142), my reading ultimately insists that the problems of narrating god are, for Milton, fundamentally irresolvable. 13 John rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1996), 24. umrich concludes by urging Milton critics to find “in the union of his poetry and thought more than the sum of its parts” (146). 14 see Maurice Kelley’s seminal study, this Great argument: a study of Milton’s de doctrina Christiana as a Gloss upon Paradise Lost (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1941). The reading of Paradise Lost that i will advance does not depend on Milton’s authorship of de doctrina, though accepting his authorship does help establish the relationship that i propose between systematic theology and narrative as forms of intellectual inquiry. n any case, i follow what now seems to be a solid consensus in favor of Milton’s authorship. see rumrich’s summary of the circumstantial evidence in “The Provenance of de doctrina Christiana: a view of the Present state of the Controversy,” in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, ed. Mark r. Kelley, Michael lieb, and John T. shawcross (Pittsburgh: duquesne Univ. Press, 2003), and the painstaking textual and historical analysis of gordon Campbell, Thomas Corns, John K. Hale, and Fiona J. Tweedie, Milton and the Manuscript of de doctrina Christiana (oxford: oxford Univ.

Press, 2007). 15 For a discussion of the problem of genre, see Phillip donnelly, “The teloi of genres: Paradise lost and de doctrina Christiana,” Milton studies 39 (2000): 74-100. John C. Ulreich suggestively uses Philip sidney’s poetic theory to frame the relationship between the texts, proposing that “the treatise represents an ‘idea or fore-conceit’ that the poetry ‘figures forth,’ so that ideas formulated in prose are actualized in the concrete form of the poetry” (“‘substantially express’d’: Milton’s doctrine of the incarnation,” Milton studies 39 [2000]: 101-102). 6 For a detailed analysis of the influence of ramist method in de doctrina, see Campbell, “de doctrina Christiana: its structural Principles and its Unfinished state,” Milton studies 9 (1976): 243-60. 17 see Walter ong, ramus, Method, and the decay of discourse: From the art of discourse to the art of reason, (1958; repr. , Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004), 286: “ramism assimilated logic to imagery and imagery to logic by reducing intelligence itself, more or less unconsciously, in terms of rather exclusively visual, spatial analogies. 18 donnelly speculates, along these lines, that the experience of writing a biblical epic that “reflects a clear understanding of the inextricable relation between biblical narrative form and doctrinal content,” may have led Milton to abandon a revision of the theological manuscript (96). 19 John locke, a Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of st. Paul to the Galations, romans, Corinthians, Ephesians, to Which is Prefix’d an Essay for the Undertanding of st. Paul’s Epistles, by Consulting st.

Paul Himself (london, 1707), ix. 20 see Michael bauman, a scripture index to John Milton’s de doctrina Christiana (binghampton: Medieval and renaissance Texts society, 1989), 176-78. John Calvin’s institutes, by contrast, has 5,574 citations. robert Hodge locates one such distortion: Milton (d, 6:127) quotes John 9:29 (“We know that god spake unto Moses”) but fails to note that the line is spoken by skeptics of Jesus, who are distinguishing the true 54 theology and Narrative Form in Paradise lost evelation given to Moses from the revelation (falsely, they suggest) claimed by Jesus; see Hodge, Foreshortened time: andrew Marvell and seventeenth Century revolutions (Cambridge: brewer, 1978), 12. 21 see John Calvin, Calvin: institutes of the Christian religion, ed. John T. Mcneill, trans. Ford lewis battles, 2 vol. (london: s. C. M. Press, 1961), 1:121: “For who . . . does not understand that, as nurses commonly do with infants, god is wont in a measure to ‘lisp’ in speaking to us?

Thus such forms of speaking do not so much express clearly what god is like as accommodate the knowledge of him to our slight capacity. ” see also ames, 10: “nostro more necessario explicantur illa quae ad deum spectant: hinc frequens in istis rebus est modus ille loquendi, qui dicitur anqropopaqeia [Those things which look to god are necessarily explained in our manner: that mode of speaking is common in those matters, which is called anthropopathy]. ” 22 see neil graves, “Milton and the Theory of accommodation” studies in Philology, 98 (2001): 251-72. raves, noting Milton’s anxiety about metaphor, suggests that Milton’s theory of accommodation is essentially metonymic instead; Milton, he argues, accepts biblical revelation as literally true, though incomplete. it is worth noting that accommodation in this sense, since it does not alter the nature of what it expresses, is a sharply diminished concept. 23 see Kevin Killeen, “‘a nice and Philosophical account of the origins of all Things’: accommodation in burnet’s sacred theory (1681) and Paradise Lost,” Milton studies, 46 (2007): 106-22. Killeen suggests, in the same vein as graves, that Milton envisions accommodation as a means of illing in the blanks of the biblical account, which further develops a connection between accommodation and narrative. 24 latin subjunctive verbs, in parentheses, are from the Works of John Milton, ed. Frank allen Patterson, 18 vol. (new york: Columbia Univ. Press, 1931-38), 14:32, 36. on ramus’s insistence that logical arguments must lead to certain, rather than merely probable, conclusions, see ong, 253. 25 For an analysis of the problems in the doctrine of the Fall and Milton’s attempts to address them, see William Poole, Milton and the idea of the Fall (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Martin evans’s Paradise Lost and the Genesis tradition (oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968). 30 Hans-Jurgen diller describes the non-mimetic, “strangely ‘objective’ nature of the speeches of the allegories in the morality plays: the cardinal sins tell everybody how sinful they are, satan informs the audience that he wants to drag every man to hell,” arguing that “the same objectivity is to be observed in the speeches of god and the Prophet” (“Theatrical Pragmatic: The actor-audience relationship” in drama in the Middle ages, 2nd series, ed.

Clifford davidson and John H. stroupe [new york: aMs Press, 1991], 324. ) 31 see John bale, a tragedie or Enterlude, Manifesting the Chief Promises of God unto Man by all the ages in the old Lawe from the Fall of adam to the incarnation of the Lorde Jesus Christ (london, 1577). The play was “compyled” (according to its title page) four decades before its first printing. samuel Fallon 55 32 on post-reformation biblical interpretation, see arnold Williams, the Common Expositor: an account of the Commentaries on Genesis 1527-1633 (Chapel Hill: Univ. f north Carolina Press, 1948). 33 see Milton, Works, 18:228–32. 34 lucy Hutchinson’s genesis epic order and disorder, ed. david norbrook (oxford: blackwell Publishers, 2001) is a good example of poetic reticence. book 3 of Fletcher’s Historie, as mentioned above, features an allegorical debate in heaven between Justice and Mercy. abraham Cowley represents god in heaven once in davideis, but explicit warnings and an ornate literary structure mark the scene as massively accommodated; see a. r. Waller, ed. , the Poems of abraham Cowley (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.

Press, 1905), 25. 35 see Milton, Paradise Lost, 10. 97-98: “the voice of god they heard / now walking in the garden. ” The poem makes clear that the “voice” belongs to the son. augustine likewise suggests that god likely spoke to adam through a mediator, but unlike Milton he attributes the voice not to the son but to an unspecified holy creature. see augustine, de Genesi ad Litteram, ed. P. agaesse and a. solignac, in ? uvres de saint augustin, series 7, volume 49 (Parise: desclee de brouwer, 1972), book 8, section 27, paragraph 49. 6 Milton explains the son’s office as mediator, to which he refers frequently in Paradise Lost, in de doctrina, arguing that the son mediates at all times between god and his creation: “[i]t is the Father by whom and from whom and through whom and in whom all things are . . . The son is not he by whom but only through whom all things are–all things, that is which were made . . . but with this exception, all things except him who subj

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